All-American Nativism

by Daniel Denvir

  In 2014, the New York Times reported that foundations including the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, and the Atlantic Philanthropies had contributed more than $300 million over a decade to immigration organizations. Since 2003, Carnegie alone had contributed about $100 million. It was all, said Sharry, “about a movement that could win the grand prize: legislation that puts 11 million people on a path to citizenship.”195 Grassroots groups that decried border militarization and enforcement, NDLON’s Chris Newman told me, got shut out.

  The split between grassroots and Beltway organizations echoed history. The National Council of La Raza had been founded in 1968 in part to engage in the sort of advocacy that old-line Hispanic organizations like the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC, at best shied away from.196 Under Obama, DC-based establishment groups like NCLR were accused of selling out undocumented immigrants in a hopeless campaign to win CIR. The Washington-based organizations mistook access for influence—and in doing so offered Obama political cover for mass deportations.

  In early 2014, the grassroots revolted against the CIR consensus and the establishment coalition led by groups like CAP, NCLR, and the National Immigration Forum. DREAM organizers joined a plethora of grassroots groups like NDLON to demand #Not1More deportation: ¡Ni una mas! Major forces like the AFL-CIO and PICO coalition also got involved.197 “The more dependent a group is on grassroots support, the more likely it is to pressure the White House to do something on deportations,” Politico reported. “The more a group’s influence relies on its access to power, the less likely it is to push back.” The Obama administration still insisted that it could not act to halt deportations on its own. “It’s becoming something that you can’t control,” Representative Luis Gutierrez said at the time. “People have tried to control it. This administration has put inordinate pressure on people not to criticize the president on his immigration policy and not to talk about prosecutorial discretion.”198

  The grassroots strategy was to put a face on individual immigrants and “show who Obama is actually deporting even though he says he’s not deporting them,” veteran DREAMer activist Mohammad Abdollahi told me. Obama promised to deport “felons, not families.” But lots of “good” immigrants were being deported too. And how bad were the ‘‘bad’’ ones, given the vast number of individuals convicted of crimes in the carceral state?

  With reform dead in Congress and intense pressure from the grassroots, NCLR president Janet Murguía in March 2014 declared Obama to be “deporter in chief,” a term seemingly cribbed from NDLON.199 Grassroots radicals, mobilizing on the ground in immigrant communities, outflanked the establishment camp in Washington and radicalized the latter’s position. Frank Sharry told me that he and other immigrant rights advocates met with Obama in March 2014, just after NCLR’s president had condemned Obama. “When Janet [Murguía] spoke up,” he said, “it was the most intense silence you can imagine. It was clear [Obama] was composing himself … to not express how thoroughly pissed off he was.”200

  In April, protesters organized by NDLON’s #Not1More campaign marched on the White House. “We are bringing the human suffering to the doorstep,” said organizer Marisa Franco.201 But even then, many White House–aligned groups continued to go so far as to ask the president to delay taking unilateral action to keep CIR alive. In May, major establishment groups called on Obama “to allow for this process to take place before issuing administrative action. We believe the President should move cautiously and give the House Leadership all of the space they may need to bring legislation to the floor for a vote.”202 That same day, Obama announced he would delay a review of deportation policies, suggesting close coordination with advocates.203 Republican representative Raúl Labrador later warned that executive action “would see an all-out war here in Congress about him taking the law into his own hands.”204 Leading CIR advocates and the Obama White House seemed to agree.

  In June 2014, Republican House Majority leader Eric Cantor lost a primary race to an upstart Tea Party–backed challenger who relentlessly accused him of supporting “amnesty.”205 His sin? Supporting not a widespread legalization of most undocumented immigrants but merely a path to citizenship for DREAMers.206 Local law enforcement refusals of ICE requests for immigration holds surged in the lead up to the midterms.207 Across the country, youth activists were frequently interrupting Obama, Hillary Clinton, and other Democrats during their speeches. “Unfortunately, that’s why the president delayed administrative relief—they didn’t think Latinos were as important as other folks who they needed,” said Dream Action Coalition codirector Erika Andiola, a leading undocumented organizer. “I’m with you,” Obama told hecklers in Bridgeport, Connecticut. “And you need to go protest the Republicans.” One prominent Democratic operative told the press that “it’s a little disturbing now days before the election to see so much focus on Democrats when it’s still absolutely clear that the Republicans are the enemy.”208

  On the ground, Secure Communities was under unprecedented stress. In October 2013, California governor Jerry Brown signed the Trust Act, limiting local law enforcement’s cooperation with ICE—a sharp break from the nativist tide that had once roiled the state.209 But just a year prior, he had vetoed the legislation in the lead-up to the election under pressure from the Obama administration.210 In March 2014, the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled that ICE detainers were not mandatory.211 The next month, a federal judge in Oregon ruled the same, finding that Clackamas County had violated a woman’s Fourth Amendment rights by detaining her without probable cause.212 Cooperating with ICE wasn’t just bad policy; it exposed localities to heavy civil damages. Almost immediately, counties across Oregon announced that they would no longer honor ICE detainers.213

  The decades-long enforcement crackdown had not only shattered millions of immigrant lives but also helped create and sustain a popular narrative about dangerous, murdering, raping, and drug-dealing criminal aliens.214 In 2013, the Remembrance Project, highlighting the stories of “families whose loved ones were killed by illegal aliens,” began to receive media attention beyond right-wing outlets.215 The organization was founded in 2009 by Texan Maria Espinoza, who declared that her family had come from Mexico “the right way” and boasted of growing up in a home with no Mexican flags. “It was just America and the Bible.” She wrote things like “child molestation and rape are very numerous in this illegal alien demographic!” and posted a link to an article on the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer site entitled “Family Furious as Illegal Alien Let Out of Jail to Kill White People.” “Every state,” Espinoza declared, “is a border state.”216

  The Remembrance Project received funding from U.S. Inc., an organization run by John Tanton, the Michigan activist who founded the contemporary nativist movement in 1979.217 The dominant anti-immigrant message had become that immigrants were systematically murdering Americans. This framing both innovated upon and synthesized the various forms of nativism that had developed since the 1970s—populationist, linguistic, cultural, fiscal, economic, anti-crime, and anti-terrorism—into an existential nativism fixated on death and demographic change that would become the core of Trump’s presidential campaign. All these themes had been present in previous eras. But as sociologist Kitty Calavita writes, “If immigrants serve as scapegoats for social crises, it stands to reason that the specific content of anti-immigrant nativism will shift to encompass the prevailing malaise.”218 That malaise was now existential, the fear of what white nationalists call “the Great Replacement.”

  Detained and sent back

  In the spring and summer of 2014, thousands of unaccompanied minors and families fled across the border, escaping poverty and violence in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Rather than welcoming the migrants—who, after all, were departing countries thrown into chaos in significant part by decades of US proxy wars, deportations, and economic policy—the Obama administration responded harshly, mov
ing to detain them while their asylum claims pended.219

  The Obama administration opened one facility to incarcerate asylum-seeking families in southeastern New Mexico, far from most lawyers who could represent them in asylum proceedings, as Wil S. Hylton detailed in a February 2015 New York Times Magazine story. In response, lawyers began to travel to the small town of Artesia. What they found when they arrived were “young women and children huddled together. Many were gaunt and malnourished, with dark circles under their eyes.” “Kids vomiting all over the place.” “A big outbreak of fevers.” “Pneumonia, scabies, lice.” A school that often seemed to be closed.220

  Such detentions would serve, the Obama administration hoped, as a deterrent. “It will now be more likely that you will be detained and sent back,” DHS secretary Jeh Johnson forebodingly warned while presiding over the opening of a massive detention facility for women and their children in Dilley, Texas. The for-profit Corrections Corporation of America* operated the facility.221 The same day Johnson visited the detention center in Artesia, according to a Hylton source, ICE deported seventy-nine people back to the US-tilled killing fields of El Salvador. Of this group, ten youth were later reported to have been killed.

  One reason that Obama may have instituted family detention of asylum seekers, immigration law scholar Juliet Stumpf told me, was to protect DACA—which is the same rationale Napolitano had reportedly given to justify Secure Communities. Conservative critics had asserted that the asylum seekers had been lured by DACA’s deportation protections, a rationale that Attorney General Jeff Sessions would later cite when he announced in 2017 that Trump was ending the program.222 Once again, Obama saw draconian immigration policy as a means to reform. And, perhaps, he also saw minor reforms as a way to protect enforcement.

  In November 2014, Republicans took control of the Senate and successfully cut into Democrats’ advantage among Latino voters—who, after all, are a diverse constituency in terms of race, nationality, class, religion, and ideology.223 But instead of welcoming those voters to the party, incoming Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell responded to the racist base that had long since become Republicans’ indispensable constituency. He warned Obama that unilateral action on immigration would be like “waving a red flag in front of a bull,” a surprisingly fitting metaphor. Obama, however, had a restive base of his own to attend to.224

  After the election, Obama addressed the nation during prime time to announce major executive actions to further limit deportations.225 The centerpiece was a new program to protect millions of undocumented parents of US citizens from deportation, called Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA).226 Though Obama didn’t mention it, Secure Communities would, at least in name, be replaced by the Priority Enforcement Program (PEP).227 Fingerprint sharing, the technological basis for Secure Communities, remained. But ICE would limit enforcement mostly to people convicted of a narrowed set of crimes, and typically request notification of a prisoner’s release instead of requesting that their detention be extended, easing localities’ liability concerns.

  Secure Communities was in crisis, DHS secretary Johnson acknowledged. In September 2014, the percentage of individuals targeted by a detainer who were taken into ICE custody had declined to 41.2 percent while the portion of detainers marked as refused had risen to 10.1 percent—up from zero in 2008.228 “The reality is the program has attracted a great deal of criticism,” Johnson wrote. “Governors, mayors, and state and local law enforcement officials around the country have increasingly refused to cooperate with the program.”229

  The Tea Party, which by that point had “become a movement largely against immigration overhaul,” erupted with anger.230 But it had long since become clear that they would react that way regardless of what Obama did. These three victories—DACA, DAPA, and PEP—demonstrated that the grassroots radicals were right: political independence and militancy protected immigrants while seeking access in pursuit of compromise facilitated their deportation.

  DAPA was blocked by a right-wing federal judge, a ruling that was upheld by the Supreme Court in a split decision thanks to Senate Republicans refusing to allow Obama to fill a vacant seat. In a painfully revealing irony, the Republican-led states that filed the challenge against DAPA made a point of citing Obama’s prior statements that he did not have the legal power to act unilaterally. PEP’s reforms did turn out to be substantial, with ICE arrests and deportations from the interior each falling by about two-thirds between fiscal years 2011 to 2016. The reforms, however, also succeeded in luring resistant localities back into cooperation with ICE.231 But it was too little, too late to decisively challenge the powerful immigrant-threat narratives that the bipartisan establishment had for decades co-authored with their enemies on the nativist right. The right-wing story line was set. All it needed was its orange-hued hero.

  When Mexico sends its people

  On June 16, 2015, Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign. From the beginning, immigrant criminality was without question his most salient message. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he warned. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems … They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”232

  Much of the country was outraged by Trump’s comments. But they should not have been surprised. Americans had been digesting a steady stream of right-wing news highlighting immigrant crime alongside mainstream political rhetoric that long portrayed the border as a violent threat. By the time Trump announced, what had begun as an amalgam of fears over drugs and immigration’s economic, criminal, cultural, and demographic impact had transmogrified into the specter of a raping and murdering criminal army, fed by lurid anecdotes whose dots right-wing media connected into a total monstrosity.

  Just over two weeks before Trump announced, Ann Coulter had published her book ¡Adios, America! The Left’s Plan to Turn America into a Third World Hellhole. In it, she argued that “the rape of little girls isn’t even considered a crime in Latino culture” and that “Mexicans specialize in corpse desecration, burning people alive, rolling human heads onto packed nightclub dance floors, dissolving bodies in acid, and hanging mutilated bodies from bridges.” By one reviewer’s count, a full six chapters are focused on immigrant rapists.233

  Anxieties over sexuality, gender and reproduction have long served as justifications for racial and economic hierarchy. An immigrant man violating an American woman had become the counterpart to long-standing nativist preoccupation with Latina birth rates, and with Mexican women entering the United States to birth “anchor babies.” The contemporary nativist movement was founded by overpopulation alarmists. But the alarm had become explicitly focused on the reproductive dynamics of Latinas, portrayed as fueling the reconquista, white genocide, and the ‘‘Great Replacement.’’ As Tanton put it: “Those with their pants up are going to get caught by those with their pants down!”234

  ¡Adios, America! has been widely credited for shaping Trump’s anti-immigrant politics.235 Before announcing, he tweeted that it was a “great read.” Though Trump doesn’t read books, he picked up on its themes. “Where do you think all that spicy stuff about Mexican rape culture came from?” Coulter tweeted. “@realDonaldTrump got an advance copy.” As for Coulter, she credited Peter Brimelow’s 1992 National Review cover story—a touchstone for 1990s nativism—for sparking her interest in the subject.236 Trump’s pronouncements were met with understandable offense but also misplaced shock. Just two decades prior, Brimelow’s book had been praised in the New York Times and The Atlantic.

  Weeks after Trump announced, a real-life incident provided characters for his story line when an undocumented immigrant shot Kathryn Steinle, a young white woman, dead on San Francisco’s Embarcadero.237 The man was believed to be homeless, collecting cans along the pier.238 He showed signs of mental illness, and said that he had found the gun, repor
ted stolen from a Bureau of Land Management ranger’s car, wrapped in a T-shirt.239 Apparently, he shot the bullet into the ground and it then ricocheted, striking and killing Steinle. His defense argued that he did not even realize it was a gun and that he fired it by accident.240

  The shooter had been transferred from prison, where he served a sentence for illegal reentry, to the San Francisco sheriff who then released him. He had a warrant out for a small-time marijuana offense. But since there was apparently nothing violent on his record, and he would never have been prosecuted for the old, trifling pot bust he was wanted for, the sheriff of the iconic liberal city refused to honor a request to hold him for ICE. It became and remains a cause célèbre on the right, and was sucked into a national discussion fixated on immigrants’ violent criminality that Trump’s announcement had inflamed like never before.*

  Steinle’s killing, Trump declared, was a “senseless and totally preventable act of violence” and “yet another example of why we must secure our border.”241 He talked about the killing constantly, referring to the victim as “beautiful Kate Steinle,” making her into an icon of innocent white womanhood under threat from immigrant criminality. In August 2015, Trump released his first policy paper, a six-page proposal calling for, among other things, an end to birthright citizenship—targeting Latina reproduction as part of a campaign to protect white lives.242 Anne Coulter called it “the greatest political document since the Magna Carta.”243 “I don’t care if @realDonaldTrump wants to perform abortions in White House after this immigration policy paper,” she tweeted. What she did not mention is that she, along with campaign aide Sam Nunberg, quietly helped write it.244